Wednesday, January 5, 2011

My first allergy-free holiday

Well, I set out on my allergy-free, holiday baking adventure with enthusiasm. However, after 8 hours into the endeavor it was intimidating, nerve-wrecking and ended in several failures mainly due to me forgetting ingredients etc. I decided to still post this mainly to collect these mishaps so I can try them again when I'm less frazzled and maybe with help. For all the recipes I'm sure they would taste REALLY good if you added two sticks of butter and two cups of sugar but let's try not to overdue it. I attempted: snickerdoodles, rootbeer pinwheel cookies, flourless brownies, and sweet potato crumble bars.

Allergy Free Snickerdoodles via Eat the Love, a food blog who's motto really speaks to my cooking-just eat the love out of my cooking and then you can throw the rest away. :) These snickerdoodles were the best of my cooking attempts and I actually fed them to others. Considering I never made pre-allergy snickerdoodles it was interesting and exciting.

(I was house-sitting at the time, yay for a kitchen-aid!)

Cute as buttons

Rootbeer Pinwheel Cookies via VeganEatsAndTreats, seemed to bake well and freeze well with the main dilemma being... where do you find rootbeer extract? I tried Fred Meyer's, Safeway, New Seasons, Whole Foods, and Kitchen Kaboodle. Ridiculous. So in order to make my first pinwheel cookie anyways, I used cocoa powder for the brown dough. I did wish they had more sugar and I frosted them when serving them to others. Turned out good but I will search higher and lower for that extract.

Flourless Brownies via Whole Foods Market, I had seen this recipe a couple times and thought I would give it a go. The 'flourless' version uses a can of black beans instead to flour and though you are not supposed to notice a difference, I thought it tasted like ground black beans. :-P They were gooey and never cooked in the middle at all. Mostly a failure that I don't plan on trying again-it went straight into the trash. Other bloggers claim these to be amazing but, I will have to do some more research. I do love my sisters food processor-thanks sis! Also, these are the only chocolate chips that are safe for me, that I can find-the Enjoy Life brand found at Whole Foods.

Sweet Potato Crumble Bars via Affairs of Living, was to be the big kahuna. A busy recipe that I was looking forward to. Unfortunately I saved it till last and was exhausted and intimidated. I ended up forgetting the milk which, was important and was the sugar additive. I wish it tasted as well as it photographed but it ended up tasting like bad baby food. I wanted it to have more maple syrup or sugar or something to make it more of a dessert. Once I recover from failure I would like to attempt this again with the forgotten ingredients.

Toasted oats

Baked sweet potatoes

Crust

Filling

Crumble

And so ends my first holiday allergy-free baking adventure, a little worse for wear but more informed about baking and my own limits of being in the kitchen.

1 comment:

wow, what a great post! I love your blog!! your little pinwheels look just perfect! I got my root beer extract when I was visiting New Orleans, I think it's kind of a thing there. But, I bet you could order some online if you can't find it locally. It's pretty amazing - very heavy duty stuff!